I wouldn't have when my first child was born three years ago but decided to risk it for my second when Sprint introduced the Samsung MM-A800, the first mobile phone in the United States equipped with a two-megapixel camera.

Well, actually, I didn't take that big a risk.

To ensure there'd be no permanently blank pages at the very start of my daughter's childhood photo album, I also brought along a trusty film camera.

The camera-phone shots provided more than a few album-worthy pictures, but even those printed with blurs, blares of light and muddy contrasts. None came out as sharp or vivid as images taken by a film camera.

The A800's image quality was, of course, far superior to prints from photos taken with the low-resolution "VGA" cameras built into so many phones, as well as the 1-megapixel models that are becoming more common.

For comparison, I printed a series of identical shots from a Sanyo phone with a 1.3 megapixel camera, all abysmal.

The Samsung phone introduces some other nice touches to phone photography: autofocus; a digital zoom function in 10 increments; a sliding lens cap to prevent smudges; a choice of USB port or removable storage card to transfer pictures to a computer or compatible printer; and a big color screen that makes viewing pictures and Web content more pleasurable.

But all that is somewhat beside the point.

Since the digital photos taken by lower-end camera phones already are adequate for e-mail attachments and phone-to-phone picture messaging, the main advantage of a 2-megapixel camera phone has to be the ability to print out pictures as you might with any camera.

There's more to a digital camera than megapixels, so it's hard to know if the digital imperfections - particularly at the overlaps between objects, people, colors and backgrounds in any given photo - are a function of resolution or the image-processing module inside.

A standalone digital camera with the same resolution as the A800 might produce better shots because the image processor isn't competing for space within the guts of a cell phone. Nor are the photo components an additional manufacturing expense in a standalone camera as they are in a phone. Then again, Samsung now sells a 7-megapixel phone in Korea, so these tradeoffs seems to be fading.

I used three different online services to print my photos from the A800 just to make sure the image quality was a reflection of the camera.

The truest images were captured outdoors. Many of the indoor photos suffered from motion blur, a sign the photo sensor needs a real flash rather than the lamp installed on camera phones. Flashes freeze motion, yielding sharp pictures. Here, instead of illuminating the entire picture with a dispersed burst of light, a spotlight often ringed the subject, casting a glare.

At nearly 2 inches thick, the A800 is a tad bulkier than I'd prefer for a cell phone.

But I'll let the photo enthusiasts carry around as many devices as they like. This amateur looks forward to the day when all you need is one.